Month: June 2005

How not to do business.

I just got spammed by someone using LinkedIn. I’m really getting tired of these things. I don’t like LinkedIn or any of the other ‘contact management’ sites. I have no idea who this guy is, or what his business is, so I visited his site (which I sussed out of his email address – theRead More

Sysadmin tidbit for the day

While setting up the new host for Homeport, I’m doing a completely new installation of Debian Linux. My preferred mail system is Postfix, which uses the standard pile of configuration files and the like. One of my beefs with Postfix is it requires all files to be owned by root. I also like having myRead More

Geeky stuff I didn’t know.

I’m in the process of deploying a new host for all of Homeport’s services (all the shell accounts, mail, etc etc), since we’re moving in a month. This means setting up a brand new machine in a colo location from scratch. I’ve chosen the Debian ‘Sarge’ release for my platform, seeing as I run itRead More

The weekend in review.

“Believe me, my young friend (said the water rat, solemnly), there is nothing -absolutely nothing-half as much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing about. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away or whether you don’t, whether you arrive at your destination or whether youRead More

No greater damnation…

… than a man’s own words. These are the words of Karl Rove, at a New York Conservative Party get-together. There’s nothing that makes me more nauseous, or underlines the horror that the conservative party represents in our government, than this man’s characterization of Liberalism vs Conservatism. Conservatives believe in lower taxes; liberals believe inRead More

When Volunteer Organizations Go Bad

I’ve been following, with some level of nausea, the unfolding saga that is going on in the Texas VHF-FM Ham Society. This is a reasonably long-lived non-profit organization of ham enthusiasts that has, unfortunately, degenerated into a pissing match between members that has gone as far as bringing in lawyers and restraining orders. In myRead More

Some slightly good news

From the ACLU : Late Wednesday afternoon, the House of Representatives took perhaps the most significant vote in the nearly four year debate over the USA PATRIOT Act. They voted 238 to 187 to amend the CJS spending bill by exempting libraries and bookstores from the scope of foreign intelligence records demands under Section 215Read More

National Academies Sets up pro-evolution website

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The National Academies, the flagship of U.S. science, said on Friday it had set up a Web site to battle attempts to portray evolution as mere speculation about how life developed on Earth. The Web site, http:/nationalacademies.org/evolution/, carries links to various reports on evolution, which some U.S. religious groups want to beRead More

It amazes me…

… how so many people who… did not sit on the 14 weeks of evidence presentation… have never met, seen, talked to, or interviewed the parties involved… have never had one day of legal schooling… were not in the jury… in fact, have not seen anything of the evidence other than what has been filteredRead More

Java JBoss Geek Trick du jour

I’m doing a lot of work in JBoss, and one of the bugs I’ve run into is that if an applications initial deployment fails, JBoss refuses to un-deploy it. It throws this error when you try to redeploy the app (in this case, the app is called ‘app1’ and is deployed as an EAR file)Read More